Stephen Pollard is Editor of the Jewish Chronicle and has written columns for several publications including The Times and the Daily Mail and maintained a lively Spectator blog. He is also the author of the controversial 2004 biography of David Blunkett, and co-authored A Class Act: The Myth of Britain's Classless Society, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

A bit of Fry has become a lorryload. Enough!

The Yiddish word “chutzpah” is usually defined as a man who kills both his parents, then pleads for a lighter sentence on the grounds that he is an orphan. No more. From now on, I’ll define it in just two words: Stephen Fry.

We Brits love our national treasures. They come in all shapes and sizes, from mad-Lefty-turned-loveable-granddad Tony Benn, to everyone’s favourite Jewish uncle, Lionel Blue, and the nation’s naughty sweetheart, Barbara Windsor.

Mr Fry is the most recent addition to their ranks. Somehow, he has morphed from jobbing comedian and actor to a guru whose wit, wisdom and all-round general cleverness we are supposed to adore and admire in equal measure.

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t.

On Sunday night, he compered the Baftas, the annual pre-Oscar British film awards. Mr Fry, who has been the ceremony’s off-and-mostly-on host for the past decade, began with a plea to the winners to keep their remarks within the time limit. Quite right. The interminable luvvie thank-you of legend has moved beyond amusement value, through caricature, to come out the other end as just thoroughly boring.

But whatever qualities Mr Fry may possess, self-awareness is clearly not one of them. His plea for restraint came in the course of an opening monologue that went on and on and on and on and on and on and then on again… for 15 minutes.

Fifteen minutes, that is, of grating archness that challenged any viewer not to escape into the kitchen for a cup of tea. I could, in fact, have done just that – walked to the kitchen, boiled the kettle, put the tea bag in, added milk, sat down, read the paper, drunk the cuppa, washed it and returned to the TV – without missing even half of Mr Fry’s opening remarks, and without missing a single award in a programme that was supposedly about celebrating winners and watching Hollywood stars strut their stuff at the podium.

At points on Sunday night, it seemed as if it was all merely a sideshow to what Mr Fry believed to be the main event: namely, Stephen Fry. Every award was introduced with the same elaborately ponderous faux-wit – moderately amusing once, but simply tiresome on repeated hearing.

There must, I suppose, be someone who still finds his “look at me, I know all sorts of words and can speak in contrived sentences” excuse for wit still amusing. In fact, I know there is. More than one person, as it happens. And, to Mr Fry’s good fortune, they happen to commission TV programmes. Because no matter what the channel or subject, there he is.

One day it’s BBC1 and the Baftas; on another it’s BBC2 and QI; on another it’s Channel Five and a programme about gadgets. And that’s just this year. Over the two weeks of the Christmas break it was calculated that Mr Fry was on our screens in 189 TV programmes, including more QI repeats than you would have thought could possibly exist.

Even if he were Oscar Wilde, Isaiah Berlin and P G Wodehouse rolled into one, you might easily tire of him over 10 programmes in a fortnight, let alone 189. Well, he isn’t. And we certainly did.

And there’s no escape. Disappear to the other side of the world and still you’ll be stuck with him. From the sound of it, it’s even worse in Australia. Indeed, last week a former senator complained to a government inquiry about his seemingly constant presence on Aussie TV. How, she asked, were viewers meant to know that they were in Australia, given how often the British comedian was on their screens? I sympathise. If there was a choice between Neighbours and Stephen Fry, I would probably opt for the former, too.

But why should the Australians be the only ones to complain? If Mr Fry’s non-stop appearance on TV is a statement of modern British identity then we’re in big trouble. Commissioning editors seem to regard his presence as adding an aura of intellectual heft to their otherwise lightweight programmes. Mr Fry is clearly not a fool. But it’s beyond me why the ability to bore on repeatedly in the same orotund style is seen as evidence of brainpower. It is evidence of nothing more than the ability to bore on repeatedly.

Mr Fry has just finished playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Since it was on in the West End, and so wasn’t covered by the licence fee, I’ve not been forced to pay for it. But I’m told it was not so much Malvolio he was playing as – who’d have guessed? – that great character, Stephen Fry. Well, I’m sure if Shakespeare had been aware of Mr Fry, he’d have written him into more of his plays.

I’m sure Stephen Fry is a thoroughly lovely man, a terrific friend, completely wonderful in every way. But enough! As Clement Attlee once advised Harold Laski: a period of silence on his part would be welcome.